Awakened Wisdom in Japan

Awakened Wisdom in Japan,

The workshop, Claim Your Awakened Life Now!, was just offered in Japan. I am very grateful to J., Mika, Kyoko, and to all the others who helped to organize and to promote the event.
It was an exciting experience to be a part of the offering and receiving of the Awakened Wisdom program. I am especially grateful to Mika and Kyoko for their beautiful translation.
Many people who attended told me that they felt that this marked the beginning of a new time, a new era, in Japan. I feel it at a global level that a beautiful awakening is unfolding and everyone who attended came in service to this.
I am very pleased to see how the message of Awakened Wisdom crosses over cultural lines and touches people heart to heart.
I learned much from this event and I return home, to rest and to assimilate the experience into my being.
Thank you as well to others who shared meals, conversations, hopes and dreams, while guiding me through my first time in Japan, at least in this life.
I hope to return for a more advanced offering and so for those who asked me to consider that, stay tuned for future announcements.

Go in Happiness,
Patrick Ryan
www.AwakenedWisdom.com

Awakened Wisdom in Israel

Awakened Wisdom in Israel,
The Claim Your Awakened Life Now! workshop was recently offered in Israel. I want to thank the partners that organized it and all the beautiful people that attended.
In order to tell this story and keep personal identities confidential I will refer to the good people involved according to their gender and their cultural background. To the extent that adds to the illusion of separateness, I apologize. I don’t know how else to tell the story.
It was set in an amazing retreat center in the Negev Desert. The setting was very simple and that allowed us to really blend in with the sacred land and to drop more deeply into the experience of what it is to be human.
As much the intention of the gathering was to offer and receive the Awakened Wisdom work the Universe through its Divine wisdom had an additional plan for us all. In order to unfold that plan the Universe inspired some Palestinian people to join us as well. This added such a rich fabric to an already beautiful plan.
The Jewish culture and the Arab culture are taught not to trust each other and that is the message that members of each group receive at a very young age. At the level of soul to soul such agreements do not exist.
Without exception the humans that attended this event wanted to move past the illusion of barriers that separated them. Blessings to you all for that!
The first challenge that showed up was when we received a message that the Israeli border guards in the interest of performing their duty had delayed the Arab participants from entering Israel. The gift of that is that it inspired the Jewish people to send love and prayers for the Palestinians to get through. It also, I believe, created the journey for everyone in this event to be more at the level of a vision quest. Through that the journey of our souls in this event was opened up to a much deeper level.
Thankfully the prayers and the wisdom of the border guards shone brightly and they allowed our Arab friends to pass through and to arrive safely.
We all came together on the land and the weaving of intentions, hopes, and Oneness began in earnest.
I have seldom felt so blessed as I was to be able to witness and to hold the space for these amazing and open people to do their work.
Two moments touched me deeply, both moments happened at about the same time at two different places in the desert.
In one moment, I looked over and saw a Palestinian woman and a Jewish woman standing face to face, heart to heart, with each other in conversation and the light that was exchanging between them was so bright that I knew that great healing was taking place.
I then turned and looked into a different direction and saw an Arab man and a Jewish man sitting on the edge of a small rock rise in deep conversation with each other. Again the light of love was opening and I knew that the work these people were engaged in was on behalf of all of us on the planet that feel separated from any other.
I watched as their minds, full of teachings and stories about why they should not trust each other struggled to move forward. I watched as their hearts, filled with desire to connect and know the full experience of each other, had them lean in as they learned to trust each other a bit at a time. Thankfully the wisdom of their hearts prevailed over the concerns of their minds and in the end the people left the event hugging and casting wishes for more of this in the world.
Blessings to you all for your desire to move forward as one people, for the courage it takes to set aside the cultural conditioning, and for the willingness to heal the memories of times past that are painful.
I am in gratitude to the Universe for using us all in this way, to forward the dream that all humans will reclaim their Oness with the divine.
Thank you to you for reading this.
Patrick Ryan
www.AwakenedWisdom.com

Adventure in Barcelona

Today I am writing from Barcelona,

Yesterday was my first day in Barcelona. I have three days to relax between leading two different workshops. It was a very surprising start to my visit here to get robbed before I even had breakfast.

That event really gave me the opportunity to experience the application of Awakened Living.

At first I was in denial, I couldn't believe it had happened. I was trying to convince myself that maybe I had misunderstood what had happened but alas I could not deny the fact, I had been robbed. I knew I had to look at this face on.

Then I got angry. I got angry at myself for allowing this to happen. I got angry at the crooks who take advantage of kind people. In this case the crooks impersonated being kind to get closer to me, to take advantage. I allowed myself to experience the anger.

I then went through a stage of asking the Universe what I could do to lessen the damage here. I cancelled my credit cards, I filed a police report, and got philosophical about it all. Making the best of a bad situation.

I wandered around for a day with barely enough money for a meal, it brought back memories of when that was a fact in my life, a time long ago. Then I observed myself falling into a depression. I had a hotel room and I didn't want to leave. I felt like sleeping all the next day. I was falling. A time to recover, to choose, to stay resourceful.

I kicked myself out of bed and asked the Universe to give me a good day. I asked to meet someone nice, I asked for a different experience than I had been having. I noticed I was nervous but I headed out for a day of tourism anyway.
I had arranged for some money to be wired to me, thank you American Express for coming through as advertised, where one of my other banks said I had better be able to prove i got robbed or I could be in trouble.

Thanks to the wonderful waiter at a nearby restaurant who as I sat down, warned me to watch my bag, and when i told him my story, he really listened and then was just nice and made such a difference.

Please be kind to a stranger today.

I finally found myself to a place where I could do a loving kindness meditation for the robbers, for the police, for myself, and with that I felt all the negative energy of this event wash away.

I am grateful for this event for revealing to me where I still have work to do and I could have done without it.
This is a small thing in the world today, it just happens to be the day I had.

All of this happened in roughly twenty four hours.
What a day.

Journey well and be safe,
Patrick

Awakened Gift Giving

Today I am writing from Istanbul:

For many people around the world this is a time for planning the gatherings of families and friends. A lot of this energy is focused around the Christmas time celebrations.
The irony is that we often allow ourselves to get so stressed out over the details that the point of this time all gets lost in the mail.
Exchanging gifts has long been established as a custom for the Christmas time. Every news broadcast is talking about the spending reports of shoppers each day and forecasting the season like a sporting match that we must win by spending more. The message is to spend lots and save the economy. – ouch!

Here are a couple of other ways to go rather than getting caught up in the consumer game.
Donate money to a charity that represents something you believe in and then give out cards to the the people on whose behapf you did that for instead of gifts.
Here are a couple of possibilities:
Red Cross – Always doing good work out there
World Vison – Look for the gift catalogue and give a goat or a well for water.
US Campaign for burma - http://www.uscampaignforburma.org/ needs your support

Let your gift dollars create important social change on the planet.

Be well

Clean and clear agreements

Agreements?
We are in many agreements with everyone that we have relationship with. Every time we make a promise or an intention with another we have created and agreement. This applies to the agreements that we have made with our selves as well.
How many times have you promised to yourself that you would exercise or read a book or some other thing only to let it slip away?
If a friend of yours kept promising to meet you somewhere and never showed up you would stop trusting their agreement. Well this is the same thing that you do to yourself. Every time you make an agreement another part of you hears it and may doubt you according to your record.
What can you do?
1) Clean up incomplete agreements with people around you including yourself.
2) Re-evaluate the promises that you have been making and not following through on. It may be that it is time to release yourself from those, “good ideas.”
3) If upon reevaluation you still feel that the promise is important to you then get help from someone around you to support you in following through.
4) Get real about what you are going to do and then do it.
5) Reward yourself for your successes, have compassion for your failed attempts, and keep clear and clean about what is needed.

Patrick Ryan
www.AwakenedWisdom.com

The Power of Words

The power of words

Words are powerful. It seems that we all know that and yet it seems that few of us have a word behavior that could really stand up to a well meaning scrutiny.
Our behavior with words becomes a standard operating procedure until something comes along or happens that causes us to reexamine how we are doing.
It is helpful to have some guidelines for the words we use.

1) What is the underlying intention beneath the words. It is important for us to be highly conscious of not just what we say but what we intended by what we said.
Sarcasm is a classic example of how intention and words are not always in alignment.
All to often someone says something like, "Excuse me," when something that they perceive as wrong happens and if these words are spoken with sarcasm what they are really saying is quite different then the literal meaning.

2) Beauty - Do all your words create beauty when they are spoken. I myself have a life long habit of complaining that I have been working on correcting over a long period of time. It doesn't matter how good the reason for complaining seems to be because complaining itself does not create beauty.

3) Courage - Do your words evoke courage. Courage is of the heart. It is contagious and it connects us to our inner resourcefulness. The opposite of courage is fear. Words that are filled with fear shut down our resourcefulness and creativity.

4) Compassion - Imagine always speaking about others and yourself from a compassionate place. The opposite of compassion is shame, blame, and guilt. Imagine that you extended a compassionate view to yourself and all those around you. What would have to shift in your words to your self and others to reflect compassion.

I could go on and I am curious about how you are doing in the choice of words that you are using on a daily basis.

Often we become blind to our word habit. It would be interesting to make a game with a friend to tap your arm every time you use words that are not consistent with the above guidelines. Try it for just one day and see where the opportunity is for you to grow your word habit in a good way.

Patrick Ryan
www.AwakenedWisdom.com

Want to do the right thing!

Want to do the right thing!

What does it take to do the “right” thing?
This is a complicated world we live in. It seems that the more information that I have about what is going on around the planet the more challenging it is to know what the right thing to do, say, or think, is.
An example of what I am talking about is the purchasing decisions I make. As I watch the news, blogs, and other sources of information I am bombarded by requests to not buy from one company or country and to support another.
Two big areas of concern for me are human rights issues and the environment.
Sometimes it is a challenge not to become overwhelmed and helpless in the face of complicated and many sided issues and from that helpless place I want to turn away or distract myself from thinking through what the impact is that I am having on the world around me.
It seems that there must be a point of balance that allows me to sometimes buy a product from a company or country that has a poor human rights record for example and at other times to say, No, without feeling like a hypocrite.
It seems to me that absolute rules box us in, in a way that is not helpful.
I always try to do the right thing I just find that it is not always clear what that is.